(Any views expressed in the below are the personal views of the author and should not form the basis for making investment decisions, nor be construed as a recommendation or advice to engage in investment transactions.)
Wishing you the g’est of m’s on this beautiful Monday morning. We’re coming to you with a whole lot to cover this week – the crypto markets have been choppy as ever, penguin drama has captivated the minds of crypto twitter (including Elon Musk), and much much more. Before we jump into the Macro Update, a few internal updates:
Discord is really starting to heat up with close to 100 members hopping in early. If you’d like to join the fun, you can do so right here. We’ll being dropping exclusive alpha, giveaways, and running other discord-only initiatives so keep an eye out.
Within the polling section of the Discord, we took the opportunity to learn more about what you (the readers) are looking for most out of our content. It was interesting to note that the majority of polled discord members indicated that they care more about specific underrated projects and new mints vs. our macro update. With that in mind, we’ll be shortening the macro update in newsletters going forward and focusing more on specific project analysis, potentially adding one separate deep dive per week, whether it’s for a new mint or a mis-priced blue chip in the making.
For this specific week we’ll be including the MC NFT Portfolio Update.
Giveaway Alert:
We teamed up with the Cold Blooded Creepz to give away 100 white list spots for their upcoming mint taking place in late December.
RULES: To enter the giveaway, like, retweet and comment tagging 3 friends on this tweet. We’ll announce the winners within the next 2 weeks.
As we’ve stated numerous times, we are bearish on *most* new mints at the moment, HOWEVER, we happen to be quite bullish on the Creepz. We also did a twitter spaces with them on Wednesday Dec 8th and got to air out a lot of questions in public. These guys have a well thought out detailed answer for everything. Hopefully we can do another one of these before mint and have as many members of our community as possible attend with more questions.
Art = fresh.
Website = immersive.
Roadmap = exciting.
Team = experienced.
Community = strong.
Checks all of our boxes.
Macro Update
Another volatile week in crypto. The chop continues and this isn’t necessarily great for NFTs. On the bright side, gas was below 50 gwei for the first time in what seems like months.
Punk 4156 sold in one of the most high profile NFT sales and showed how much a whale can influence the overall project as well as the floor, with various sales in the mid 60s following this.
The BAYC is looking as strong as ever with a 2nd consecutive week above a 50 ETH floor sitting at an all time high of around 54 ETH at time of writing. With volatility and extremely low gas at the moment, we still think now is the right time to pick up high quality projects from weak hands. While things seem bleak, and many projects will not recover, we’re still only scratching the surface and a bull market will most likely reappear in 2022.
Student Becomes Master:
If we can fundamentally agree that google trends are the #1 way to know what the general public is curious about, then it’s fair to say that we aren’t overreacting when we note the importance of the fact that “nft” has surpassed “ethereum”.
The memes of NFTs as a trojan horse are more accurate than they get credit for. NFTs (and media in general) is the number 1 way to attract the masses and spur crypto adoption. Like we’ve always said, jpegs are just the start. Remember this day.
Weekly Sponsor:
This week’s newsletter is brought to you in part by the Tipsy Tiger Club.
Pre Sale: December 20th / .04 ETH
Public Sale: December 22nd / .05 ETH
Total Supply: 8,000
In full transparency, we were skeptical about this project as it seemed on the surface like another copy-pasta animal scammy shill. But we dug deeper, we met with the creators, and we were wrong – this puppy has legs.
The Tipsy Tiger creators are building what seems to be the first ever community-driven hard seltzer line, expected to be in stores by mid-to-late 2022, where NFT holders share in the profits of beverage sales. They’ve got a lot that can go wrong from a execution perspective, but also a lot that can go well if they play their cards right.
We hoped on a call with the founders to learn more about the logistics here and it turns out they are super serious. They’ve looked into this idea extensively and even the mint price/supply revolves around the math that is needed in order to actually build a hard seltzer brand. They ran us through the costs for manufacturing, licensing, IP rights, and etc. Their vision is to create something similar to the NELK boys Happy Dad line with a Metaverse spin. Kevin O’leary has stated that he likes the idea of NFTs being tied to real world value, so this checks out here for Tipsy Tigers. Also, did we forget to mention that they’re giving away a Tesla Model 3 as well.
We’ve said this from the beginning – look to join communities that treat community members like decision makers, and have a plan for how to return value to the hodlers. Obviously, this is an extremely ambitious project and we’ve seen plenty similar ones turn out to be duds. We’re comfortable covering this after speaking with team and seeing how detail-oriented and structured their plans are behind this. The risk/reward proposition is attractive here, but as always, DYOR and mint with caution. Finally, we recommend joining the discord if interested, which already has over 8k members. Seems like the founders don’t sleep because at least one of them is always active to answer any questions.
Updates On Recent Mints:
Well, as it turns out, not all projects that don’t sell out within 48 hours are doomed. This is a shock to us but an overall positive sign for hopeful builders looking to start their own project, or holders stuck in a project that didn’t sell out at mint.
Both of the projects below are projects that we covered in recent weeks – high profile/high quality and had some trouble. The following is a brief analysis of those projects.
This was probably one of the more hyped recent mints, with a lot of influencers and high profile nft players involved. Paradise Trippies sold out about 50% and for around a week nothing happened while the floor dropped. Then boom, all sold out? The floor is now ~.1 ETH at time of writing and things seem to be getting bullish. However, we noticed that there’s under 2k holders with a total supply of 10k. This seems fishy. Since the project has some real whales involved, it seems like a few whales may have minted out the rest of the project so it wouldn’t be doomed.
Now, this isn’t particularly bullish for the community, but on the other hand, with these whales involved in the project (founders etc.) there is little incentive to sell. With a large portion of the supply held by whales who don’t need the money/want the project to succeed, the floor price should continue to rise. To give the team credit, this project is one of the more unique mints of the last month with high quality art and the fact that the project had a big turn around is generally healthy for the NFT space.
Sold out barely 30% of mint. Looked to be doomed. HOWL is the prime example of how a good team that acts fast can pivot and win. Like most projects, they could have kept the mint open and tried to take in as much cash as possible. The team instead decided to burn the rest of the supply to focus on their smaller tight knit community, and this has done wonders for them so far. When they announced that they were going to burn the rest of the supply by a certain date, they also mentioned how rewards will be sent to any holders who don’t sell in that period, incentivizing diamond hands.
With the small supply and core holders who want to be there, the price is now above mint and the volume is strong as well. Since the project also has interesting ponzinomics surrounding a burning mechanism (mentioned here in previous newsletter) the supply will continue to decrease. We have no thoughts on where this will go next. But the main learning we take from this is that we were proven wrong about projects that don’t immediately sell out being doomed (at least in the short term). If a good team can save the direction of a project this is good for the overall health of the NFT space – it proves that projects aren’t purely hype driven, and quality leadership matters.
Our NFT Portfolio:
**Disclaimer: Please take all of our thoughts below with a grain of salt and always do your own research. We received recommendations in our Discord that some readers are interested in following our NFT portfolio, so we figured we’d share.
There is no advice or recommendations here, just our personal perspective. These are our holdings across multiple wallets. Unfortunately we don’t have a BAYC or Punk, but we still believe strongly that these are the best projects in the space if you *can* afford them. NFTs do not represent more than 7-10% of our total crypto holdings (and we even think 10% is ridiculously high).
Math: Portfolio does not represent the amount of ETH we’ve put into each project or how much our NFTs add up to. Rather, it’s the Floor price x # of jpegs we hold for that specific project. Tried to make this as simple as possible and this does not account for rarity.
Here is the *current* Mint Calendar Portfolio:
Pudgy Penguins (Extremely biased opinions incoming): Yes we understand all of the drama going on and that the founder Cole has basically been screwing up left and right. No, we don’t care at all. With mainstream adoption (NYT articles including the pengus), arguably the best memes (see bowl cuts on twitter everyday), psychopath whales who spent 100Eth on 1/1s and continuously buy up the floor if it goes below 1 ETH, and the penguin only discord chat is active 24/7, we can’t help but feel bullish.
Overall we can’t speak highly enough of the quality of the community. Yeah yeah we always hear bUt tHE ComMuNiTy… here’s the thing. We’ve made a large amount of strategic long-term connections and have had the opportunity to work on various projects (crypto and non-crypto) solely from twitter dms with other penguins.
Through these penguin-generated opportunities, mostly starting with a “Hey, nice peng btw, I have this idea XYZ” we have paid for the penguin ten times over. Not worried about the drama. Will leave you with this tweet below.
Hashmasks: Pretty simple rationale here.
First NFT we bought
Naming mechanism can drive value
Known as one of the OG NFTs that kicked off the bull run
Plenty of whales
MaskDao functions extremely well
Many side niche’s/communities within the project ie:
www.whataclownworld.com
Parallel Alpha: Ah yes, the NFT card game. The majority of our holdings here came from being lucky by getting in on pack drops. Sold a decent amount and probably should have sold more back then since the prices have really gone down.
Wanderers: One of our best calls in the nft space. Minted a bunch of these way back when. Sold a couple for around 5-6x. While Wanderers has taken a solid hit, it’s still around 3-4x from the mint. Love this long term and the team really continues to execute over and over again. We have 0 plans to sell any of our rares here, and will potentially offload some floors around .3 to free up some ETH if and only if there’s something else that catches our eye (will discuss in rebalancing below).
Chubbifrens: Minted a bunch of these for .09 and they're not doing too great at .034 at time of writing. We remain *cautiously optimistic* long term here due to their extremely large DAO treasury, meme-machine, fun discord, partnerships, and a focused team that’s constantly speaking with the holders. If we didn’t mint we’d be picking them up now at this price since there’s little risk in losing .03. Not sure if these have moonshot potential but we do think there is a ton of mass appeal here for when Coinbase users enter. No plans on offloading here and we do enjoy participating in their discord.
Other: There’s probably around 20 different projects here. Axolittles, VOIDs, Golden Pups, PixelBeats, Rich Gators to name a few. These are mostly projects that we either 1) minted and remained stagnant / got destroyed, or 2) remain cautiously optimistic about, with hopes that some will come back during the next bull run (Axolittles/VOIDs are the best example here). That being said, in the NFT space we expect to have plenty of Ls on the road to hitting a 10x.
How we plan on rebalancing: We have our eyes on Doodles, Cool Cats, and Toadz. Don’t plan on making a move for the rest of 2021 but *if we were* we’d offload some floor wanderers and our parallel cards to free up some ETH for one of these, as mentioned above. Most likely would pick up Toadz but we’ll be scouring the floor for some good ‘ole end of the year capitulation / tax loss harvesting.
Concluding thoughts: *Most* of our buy-ins for Penguins/Hashmasks are lower than the current floor but we aren’t up tremendously, as these are our long-term plays for now. We also aren’t down too bad from our other calls since many are mints which were fairly inexpensive. However, due to betting big on the Wanderers and Cryptodads mint (Sold all dads for 5-10x+), it’s been a wonderful year for us in the NFT space from an economic perspective even though we’d put our hit rate at around ~60%, betting big on winners outpaces small losers. While new mints are still struggling, and most are essentially a lottery ticket, we’re here to hopefully point you in the right direction (Creepz in our opinion is cream of the crop). Getting in early on a solid project can really be a gamechanger. Hope you all enjoyed this section, and we’ll update if anything changes!
Web3 Careers:
GM job hunters — we’re adding a little commentary to the job section this week to flag the trends we are seeing in Web3 hiring. All drama aside - the hot positions for the last few weeks have been Community Managers and Moderators and oh boy are there a ton of jobs out there if you’re interested. It seems like every PFP project or company involved in Web3 is looking for Discord mods and NFT community managers. On the technical side of things, there’s an abundance of software engineer jobs; many of which are focused on delivering roadmaps to established projects.
We’ve prioritized community manager and engineering positions in this weeks’ section because that’s where the hiring focus is and we’ve found awesome positions with TIME, Gary Vee’s company VaynerNFT, Star Atlas, Foundation and more! In addition to these areas, 0N1 Force is hiring for every position under the sun including a Therapist! Oculus (owned by Meta/Facebook) is looking for a VP of Metaverse Marketing — a big deal position that would be great to someone from the NFT community fill.
Let us know if you’re hiring for incredible roles or if there are other types of opportunities you’d like to see in this section! Tweet/DM us @MintCalendar, @TheChild1996, or send an email to officialmintcalendar@gmail.com.
Community Building and Safety:
Product Policy Advisor, Trust and Safety (Coinbase)
Head of Security Research (OpenSea)
TIMEPieces Community Manager, Social Media Strategy (TIME)
Community Lead (Pocket Network)
Social Media & Community Manager (VaynerNFT)
Strategy/Marketing/Miscellaneous:
Developers/Marketing/Accounting/Therapist/Project Managers and many more! (0N1 Force)
VP, Product Marketing, Metaverse (Oculus, owned by Meta)
Game Design Intern (Veve)
Software Development:
NFT Integration and Solidity Developer (Envision)
Principal Site Reliability Engineer – Remote (Star Atlas)
3D Voxel Designers (Exclusible)
Senior Software Engineer — Frontend (Foundation)
Technical Support Engineer (MetaMask)
That’s all folks! Hope you all enjoyed this week's addition. Feel free to shoot us a DM on Twitter or email us with what you’d like to see more of! We’re super active on twitter so also feel free to tag us in anything interesting.
If you’re feeling friendly feel free to share this with anyone who you feel might otherwise fall into the NGMI category.
Most of all, have a wonderful week!
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Disclaimer about sponsorships: We’ve been getting A LOT of dms about sponsorships and upcoming drops. Many are NGMI but a few projects stood out and have teams that we’ve taken the time to speak with and are excited to share info on in the near future. If you're launching a new project and are looking to work with us on promotion and/or consultation on how to plan a successful drop, feel free to slide in the DMs in Twitter.